Christians and War

I recently heard a Christian talking about the war in Iran:

You have to know who you are negotiating with. You can’t trust them.

He continued, Didn’t God even say in the Old Testament to kill everyone—men, women, and children? It sounds bad but if we don’t wipe them out, what will they do to us?

I was alarmed. For the first thousand years after Christ, there were only two Christian views of war:

1. pacificism — Christians should not engage in warfare at all
2. just-war — we must have just criteria for going to war and for conducting war. Among the criteria, here are three: war must have a just cause, be a last resort, and non-combatants must not be targeted.

Obviously, the reasoning I heard doesn’t fall anywhere close to these two views.

Starting in 1095, with the first crusade to retake the land of Israel, a conquest mentality developed within Christian thinking. But even then the goal was not genocide.

Although I wrote a long post on Old Testament warfare, specifically herem warfare, I didn’t speak up during the conversation. I didn’t know where to start. How do you boil down a ton of information into a quick sound bite?

If I spoke up I could have made any of the following points:

• The USA is not ancient Israel. We shouldn’t use Old Testament warfare commands as justification for modern-day war. Those commands were given to a specific people who were under the Old Covenant more than three thousand years ago. And they were given for specific reasons that do not apply to us. The goal was to remove idolatry from the region. But we are no longer under the Old Covenant and God’s people are no longer limited to one geographic territory.

• Are we better than the people of Iran? Can we be trusted? Haven’t we all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory?

• Many Old Testament scholars have concluded that the Old Testament warfare commands use hyperbole because the same people who were “totally destroyed” appear later even in the same book.

• The Old Testament turns the good-Israelite bad-Canaanite paradigm upside down with Rahab and her family being spared and Israel being destroyed by the Babylonians. In the end, who is good and who is bad? It was never about race; it was about clinging to the true God or idols.

• We are followers of Christ. And his teachings and example show us that we should never support wiping out an entire country. Not to mention, there are many followers of Christ in Iran. Additionally, in Matthew 15 Christ encountered a Canaanite women. How did he treat her? He commended her faith and healed her daughter.

• The Bible commands us to seek peace. Has the US really sought peace in Iran? Who initiated the conflict?

• God’s desire is for peace and nonviolence.

1. • In the beginning God did not intend for humans to engage in violence against each other. Human cruelty entered the world in Genesis 4 with Cain killing Abel, an act that God clearly condemned. And yet God did not respond to Cain’s violence with reciprocal violence. Instead, God put a mark on Cain to protect him. As the story continues, the world plunged itself into violence, causing God deep pain and grief, even to the point of regretting the creation of humans (Gen 6:6, 11, 13). These early chapters of Genesis show that God opposes violence and it grieves him deeply. Violence and destruction is not what God wants for his creation.
   • In the middle we have the nonviolent teachings and example of Christ (Matt 5:38-48), who is the “exact representation of his [God’s] being.” Christ suffered intensely, but he didn’t respond with violence nor did he call for his followers to become violent. Yet Christ did attack Satan’s kingdom, driving out demons throughout his ministry.
   • In the end we arrive at God’s eternal kingdom of peace, where all tears are wiped away (Rev 21:4).
   • In sum, God condemned bloodshed in the beginning, violence will have no place in his everlasting kingdom, and in the middle of human history God revealed his nonviolent nature through his Son. He suffered violence to put an end to violence. Hence, warfare and violence does not reveal the true heart of God. It is not what he really wants. And that leads to this conclusion: in God’s very essence, at his very core, God is deeply nonviolent. All of this, however, does not necessarily mean God would not have sufficient reasons for using violence. Remember the divine mission is nothing less than the salvation of a violent world. Stephen De Young says, “A world filled with violence needs correction, and its correction is a violent one” (147). If God gets involved, though, he does so reluctantly and always remains set apart (holy) to some degree from what we are doing. Human brutality, then, is a temporary aberration to God’s ideal plan—an aberration that he allows, grieves over, and uses for his ultimate purpose of peace.

Maybe I’ve missed something. If so, feel free to let me know. But I think we need to teach Christians to respect context—historical and literary. It’s foolish to pull out a three-thousand year-old command and apply it to modern-day geopolitics without considering the bigger picture.

If you are interested in digging into the herem warfare commands, click on the link below.

Wrestling with Herem Warfare in the Old Testament

Les Bridgeman

After graduating from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I served as a Bible and theology teacher in Asia and the U.S. My new book explores the amazing doctrine of the Trinity.